Metropolitan line (KRT)
The Metropolitan line is an east-west railway line on the Kien-k'ang Rapid Transit network operating between Ku-per in Pran-rang and Am-men, measuring 35.6 km, including its branches. Since its launch, it has been the most-utilized line on the KRT network, consistently surpassing 1 million journeys per day, owing to the prosperity along its right-of-way.
History
Proposal
The Metropolitan line was initially championed by the Liberal politician Baronet Bu (1846 – 1920), who was an open admirer of the advanced urban railways of Hadaway, the capital city of Anglia and Lechernt. He had a grand vision for Kien-k'ang that positioned it as an imperial capital city of the eastern hemisphere, though the railway was only part of his vision that saw any degree of realization.
Consturction
The trackwork of the KRT Metropolitan line was acquired and built fraught with difficulty "at every turn", owing to engineers' unfamiliarity with underground railways. While the Central Junction Railway was built only a few years before, the Metropolitan employed more steel beams rather than the brickwork that the CJR did.
In general, the Metropolitan employed two different techniques to sink its right-of-way under ground level. If it travelled between private property, it usually resorted to an open cutting, with steel or brick bridge to provide passage above. This is cheaper because it had to buy only the less valuable rear of properties. These bridges were built first, to prevent prolonged interruptions. While the government provided the space under the street free of charge, the tunnel top must be enclosed to reconstitute the street, which made construction more expensive. Brickwork was usually preferred here, but it could support itself only in the shape of an arch, so the Metropolitan ultimately had an arched loading gauge, a fact not well-liked by Baronet Bu. The route transitioned between these two types of segments, often at the expense of awkward turns.
It is a matter of great timing, according to Jack Trence, that the Metropolitan was built between 1890 and 1899, since at this point most Kien-k'ang buildings were still only two storeys tall and had only two load-bearing walls, usually perpendicular to the retaining wall, which meant that walls of open cuttings were easier to retain in view of the light or nonexistent foundations of buildings nearby. Only a decade later, the Central Railway had to negotiate taller buildings with their larger, heavier foundations. The per-mile cost of the Central Railway, admitting more luxurious appointments, was three times greater than that of the Metropolitan. However, this also means that building re-development near the Metropolitan is impossible without major structural work.
Shortcomings
While the Metropolitan line was consistently profitable since recovering from the 1913 fire, aided by the completion of its branch lines and the completion of the loop route, by the 1930 it had become overcrowded, on both the platforms and trains. Not only were the platforms too narrow and circulating space completely lacking that travellers queued outside the stations, but individuals risked passing out on the trains owing to crowding. It appears the pared-down implementation of Bu's railway has been a gross underestimate, but correcting these sizing issues after the fact would be challenging and not necessarily meaningful.
The Metropolitan's tracks in central Kien-k'ang has sharp turn and stops with short spacing, some as little as 250 metres apart from the next. Trains could thus not attain speed between stations, but it is this short spacing that makes the Metropolitan a popular means of travel in the city-centre. Additionally, sharp curves result from following streets at a shallow depth, but also meaning easy access to stations. Yet blocked by the trains in the city-centre, those in the suburbs could not travel much faster, and so commutes on the Metropolitan from suburbs is both time-consuming and likely to be a standing-room affair, an issue that the road lobby in Themiclesia has made light of as early as the late 1940s (even though car speed in comparable places was slower).
In 1961, the Super Metropolitan line was announced as a co-operative project between Kien-k'ang and the central government, aiming to serve more distant suburbs and towns with a faster trains. This directive would, by 1964, give rise to the Exchequer and District Railway, which supplants suburban services hitherto run on the mainlines and bypasses the urban bottleneck of the Metropolitan line by a new right-of-way connected to major stations on the existing network.